For fifty years I trust there isn't an educator in either
the academy or high schools who hasn't failed to
castigate Joe McCarthy as a hate-monger, liar, destroyer
of careers, and someone who routinely accused innocent
people of wrong doing.

"McCarthyism" has become the reflexive
adjective among those on the American Left when accused
of anything of less than patriotic motives or, for that
matter, taken to task for questionable behavior. McCarthy
was not only right, he's been given a bad rap by history.

For four years, from 1950 until 1954, McCarthy was the
only voice in America speaking out against those in
government that were Communists, fellow-travelers
(liberals who believed in but did not join the Communist
Party), Russian sympathizers, and Stalin apologists. His
enemies, consistent with the Left today, chose to attack
the messenger rather than the message.

From the earliest years of the New Deal until the late
1940's the government was deeply infiltrated with
Communists and their supporters. There was no shortage of
either messages to the President or evidence to support
such infiltration. Yet, Roosevelt then Truman chose to
ignore such evidence.

Adolph Berle, Undersecretary of State for internal
security at State, went to Roosevelt in 1940 with a list
of Communists in government provided by Whittaker
Chambers, a party member who'd defected. Roosevelt,
according to all accounts laughed it off and refused to
deal with it.

J. Edgar Hoover, in 1943, informed Roosevelt of Soviet
spying both within the government and at the Russian
Embassy. On this occasion Roosevelt not only disregarded
the evidence, he sent Harry Hopkins, his Domestic Affairs
advisor, to warn the Soviet embassy that their phones
were tapped.

In 1946 Hoover again went to the White House, this time
providing Harry Truman with a list of known Communists
and sympathizers still in the government. Truman's
response was: "What am I going to do? Give those
@#%&* Republicans up on the Hill something to bash me
with."

McCarthy's detractors, Communists, and Soviet
sympathizers never anticipated two things: One, the
Venona intercepts and their subsequent release; Two, the
collapse of Communism and the opening of Soviet files.

From 1943 until 1980, unbeknownst to virtually everyone,
the National Security Agency intercepted every Soviet
message going from or to the United States. It was not
until 1994 that their existence was even acknowledged,
and 1995 when the first 1,400 of 240,000 intercepts were
released to the public. Their content was damning and
supportive of the contentions of not only McCarthy but
Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, Hoover, and
others.

The collapse of Communism opened files of not only
internal Soviet spy documents but also gave the FBI, CIA,
and American scholars access to the files of the American
Communist Party that had been hidden in a Russian
warehouse since 1950. The cat was out of the clichéd
bag.

Just who was exposed by these documents. Alger Hiss who
had been the number three man at State behind Dean
Acheson and Dean Rusk, and who, most assuredly, at some
point, would have eventually been Secretary of State.
Harry Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury,
who purposely withheld allocated funding for the Chinese
Nationalists, during their Civil War, that destroyed
their currency and, thus, their efforts against Mao's
Communists.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been conduits for even
more damaging information than the atom bomb, for which
they were executed. Lauchlin Currie, Special Assistant to
F.D.R. Samuel Dickstein, member of the House of
Representatives from Brooklyn.

William and Martha Dodd, son and daughter of the U.S.
ambassador to Germany in the 1930's. Lawrence Duggan,
State Department Director of Latin American Affairs.
Harold Ickes, Sr., father of Clinton's impeachment flack,
who was Secretary of the Interior. Finally, William
Weisband, U.S. Army Signal Security Agency. This is just
a very few, the most prominent or household names one
might say.

Was Robert Oppenheimer, the Director of the Atom Bomb
Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, a member of the
Communist Party? Quite emphatically, no! His wife was.
His brother was. His mistress was. As were many of his
closest associates at the University of California. In
addition, Oppenheimer was one of those scientists in the
40's who thought that all scientific information should
be shared universally for the good of mankind.

Were any of the aforementioned exposed by McCarthy? Not
one. He'd been too late at the spy discovery game. After
all, Alger Hiss got Richard Nixon the Vice-Presidency.
White had been shifted to that historical ashbin where
failures are allowed to "resign" to, the
International Monetary Fund.

Hiss, unquestionably the most brilliant of the rising
stars at State at the age of 43, in 1947 became the head
of the Carnegie E0ndowment for Peace; a position usually
held by a senior citizen with insufficient retirement
funds. Lawrence Duggan, as the FBI closed in on him, had
the presence of mind and good sense to jump from a window
and commit suicide. Of course, he was considered a
"victim" of a non-existent "Red
Scare".

Just how many did McCarthy catch? Darn few. Of the 10,000
government employees who were exposed as Communists,
security risks, or of questionable loyalty and lost their
jobs, at the least, only forty can be attributed to
McCarthy.

Any of the major players? None, as most had either been
moved laterally by Truman or snared by the FBI.

Most of the forty were small time functionaries such as Owen Lattimore, John Stewart
Service, Philip and Mary Jane Keeney, and Howard Shapley;
and these were the most prominent. In every case, of the
forty, they were all accorded trials and attorneys before
their dismissal.

Lattimore had been Director
of the School Of International Relations at Johns Hopkins
University, advisor to FDR on China in 1941, advisor at
State in 1946-1947, preached that Mao's Communists were
"agrarian reformers", in 1948 encouraged George
Marshall to stop aid to Chiang Kai-Shek and his
Nationalists, and in 1949 urged U.S. withdrawal from
Korea.

There was only one problem in all of this for Lattimore: Hoover had given
Lattimore's FBI file to McCarthy and McCarthy had Louis
Budenz as a witness, a former Communist, who'd worked
with Lattimore. McCarthy carried the day but was forever
stuck with the sobriquet "McCarthyism".

John Stewart Service was another who had managed to hang
on, long past FBI and other snares, only to be
"outed" by McCarthy. Service was at State and
had leaked secret documents to a "front"
magazine called "Amerasia" that were used to
damage the Chinese Nationalist cause. Again, Service was
caught only as a result of a Hoover/FBI "black bag
job" (breaking into the offices of
"Amerasia").

Philip and Mary Jane Keeney had been fired from the
University Of Montana in 1938 for subversive activity. In
spite of this Philip, within two years, was at the
Library of Congress and, during the war, was with the OSS
(forerunner of the CIA). Mary Jane, meanwhile, was at the
Bureau of Economic Warfare during the war and
subsequently became part of the U.S. delegation at the
United Nations. Again, when McCarthy was challenged on
these charges, Hoover had already provided him with their
FBI files.

McCarthy's discoveries were in inverse proportion to his
notoriety. What McCarthy really did was breach the
gentlemen's agreement and game of using Communists prior
to and during the war while they were slowly dispatched
after the war. Many of these were part of the Eastern
Establishment in that they came from the
"right" families, went to the correct prep
schools and universities, belonged to the right clubs,
and had the right connections.

Hiss had gone to Johns Hopkins, Harvard Law, and had
clerked at the Supreme Court for Felix Frankfurter. They
all had impeccable credentials.

It was one thing to catch a handful of Communists outside
of government, as in the case of the Rosenbergs. It was
quite another to expose the dirty secrets of the 1930's
and 40's. That was McCarthy's sin.

Was he a pillar of virtue? Hardly! He was a dreadful
alcoholic and eventually died from cirrhosis of the
liver. He was a bully, unkempt, crude, and a lout. He
once unmercifully pummeled Drew Pearson, his antagonist
in the press, after a dinner party, in the coat room of a
Washington doyenne. He had many physical and character
shortcomings. But he was right.

For all those rushing to put pen to paper to denounce any
of the above, you'd be best advised to first do your
"homework". Read "Venona" (Yale
University Press); "The Secret World Of American
Communism" (Yale University Press); "The
Haunted Wood" (Random House); "The Venona
Secrets" (Regnery); "The Secret History Of the
KGB" (Basic Books); "Whittaker Chambers: A
Biography" (Modern Library); and "Joseph
McCarthy: Reexamining the life and legacy of America's
most hated Senator" (Free Press). If at first you
haven't read the above, then you are coming unarmed for a
battle of wits.

See you next week.

[Editor's Note: All Ideas pieces are the opinions of
their writers alone.]

Capron Writes: "He once unmercifully pummeled
Drew Pearson, his antagonist in the press, after a dinner
party, in the coat room of a Washington doyenne." I
have to take exception to the tone and tenor of this
comment. It implies that Pearson did not deserve the
beating. Pearson built his career on destroying people. A
beating was small repayment indeed. JBOC